Welcome to the Gentoo Documentation Resources. This page will give you a
quick overview on the documentation we provide. Most documentation is
released under the Creative Commons -
Attribution / Share Alike license, an open documentation license. All
documentation should also be available in a printer-friendly format. To view
this document, append ?style=printable to the URL.

If you find bugs in our documentation or have proposals, please use our
Bugtracking System and fill in
a bug report for "Docs-developer" or "Docs-user". These bugreports will
then be handled by the Gentoo Documentation
Project.

Internationalisation Effort

Our documentation is available in several languages. Although not all
documents are translated, we do our best to keep them all up to date and
provide our users with as much translated documentation as possible. If
you want to help with our translation efforts, please contact Sergey Kuleshov who is in charge of
the internationalisation efforts.

Frequently Asked Questions

As with every major project Gentoo has a FAQ too. We have first and foremost
two official FAQs maintained by the Gentoo Documentation Project:

Furthermore we have a very extensive collection of FAQs on our forums. To view those, go to
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewforum.php?f=40.

Gentoo Handbook

The Gentoo Documentation Project has started with the Gentoo Handbook development. Currently, the
first part on Installing Gentoo
is finished and has now reached the "testing" stage. Users are encouraged to try
these installation instructions and bug us with
their experience (please use the Handbook component).

More information can be found on the Gentoo
Handbook Effort homepage.

Installation Related ResourcesIntroduction

The installation related documentation provide information that can be usefull
during the installation of Gentoo Linux. This includes architecture-related
installation resources and tutorials that are to be followed during the
installation (such as LVM).

Installation Guides

The installation guides step you through the process of installing Gentoo
Linux 1.4. We support various installation approaches, depending on how much
of the system you want to custom-build from scratch.

The installation guides are available for the following architectures:

x86OnlinePrinter Friendly

AlphaOnlinePrinter Friendly

HPPAOnlinePrinter Friendly

PPCOnlinePrinter Friendly

SparcOnlinePrinter Friendly

Most users will probably need the x86
Installation Guide. For experienced users we also have a x86 Quick Installation Reference.

Alpha-users are probably also interested in our Compaq Alpha Tools Guide, which
explains how to set up the Compaq Tools package for Gentoo Alpha users.

Other Installation Related Documentation

For some people, the installation guide above doesn't suffice since their
environment doesn't permit them to boot from a LiveCD. To anticipate their
environments we provide the Alternative
Installation Guide which lists the installation steps needed to install
Gentoo from another medium (distribution, bootable CD, network boot, etc.).

Users interested in using LVM should read up our LVM
Guide which explains what steps you have to go through to get your
LVM scheme up and running.

The Gentoo System Documentation contains several guides about what makes
Gentoo Gentoo. This includes our init-system, Portage, USE-flags etc.

Portage and Related Documentation

The Portage User Guide briefly covers how
to keep your packages up to date and how to maintain your installed software.
In other words: this guide tells you how to use emerge.

The Portage Manual provides a general
overview of Portage, detailed configuration information and an end user guide
to installing and maintaining packages using the Portage system. It is
far more extended than the Portage User Guide.

The USE Howto introduces you to the ultimate
tool for customizing Gentoo -- USE flags. This howto helps you decide which
USE flags you need. It also describes the use of etcat to receive
more verbose information regarding USE-flags on a package.

Configuring Gentoo

The ENV.D Howto explains how to manage
environment variables (such as $PATH) and the dynamic linker
cache easily.

The RC-Script Guide details our system
startup and service management scripts. Besides the regular
initscript-related items it also covers initscript dependencies and
support for virtuals.

Gentoo Choices

The Kernel Guide lists the various
kernel sources Gentoo provides. Most of these kernels are maintained by
the Gentoo Kernel
Project.

System Administration DocumentationIntroduction

The System Administration Documentation contains tutorials and guides on how to
install, configure and/or manage certain aspects of system administration.
Although the focus is on Gentoo systems, several of these guides can very well
be used by non-Gentoo users.

General System Administration

The Gentoo Security Guide explains how
to harden a Gentoo Linux system against intruders and attacks. It
contains general security information (securing services, designing firewalls,
using IDS, kernel security etc.). For even tighter hardening please
visit the Gentoo
Hardened website.

The Prelinking Guide explains how to
enhance your system using prelink. With prelinking, bigger applications
start up faster.

The IPv6 Guide shows how to setup IPv6 under
Gentoo Linux. IPv6 is the next Internet Protocol and is gaining
popularity widely.

The Quickstart Guide to CLI E-mail Tools
explains how to use fetchmail, procmail, mutt, and nbsmtp.

The CVS Tutorial documents the basics of
using CVS, the Concurrent Versioning System.

Gentoo Development DocumentationIntroduction

Gentoo is a volunteer-driven distribution. It is therefor vital to have
high-quality development-related documentation available so that interested
users can easily learn how to help in the development of their favorite
distribution.

Gentoo Development Policies

The Gentoo Linux Development Policy details
current policy for the creation of ebuilds.